Of Dungeons

Almost a year ago I was contemplating a dungeon style game, and I have finally begun work on it.

I have finished off a couple of fantasy figures I have had lying around for three or four years now, and started work on some others.

At the beginning of August I ordered some Hirst Arts pieces - almost 4 kg to be precise. I somehow did my dungeon tile math wrong and ordered more tiles than I thought, but I am happy with that, as it allowed me to make more of a dungeon.

 The tiles arrived last week, and I have assembled them in various sized to allow for different room and corridor configurations.

 With some spare tiles I made two secret doors:

And here is a photo of a Mage character and a skeleton:

A Reaper Miniature

Skeleton from the Celtos range, sans shield

 I need to visit a hardware store to get some paint for the dungeon tiles, and the bases on the miniatures will be done once I have the paint and some more pollyfilla to do work on them.

The Hirst Arts tiles were a lot better than I was expecting, and I have had a lot of fun working with them.

This has only started a bug in me though - as now I want to get more Hirst Arts to make all different kinds of things.

dungeon bash

For a number of years I have collected to odd fantasy figure with the intention of playing a fantasy game.

Recently I have been taking a hard look at the Hirst Arts bits and pieces with the intention of creating a set of tiles for dungeon exploration games.

As such, I figured I needed to design a dungeon so I would know how many pieces of pre-made Hirst Arts pieces I would need. The good thing about the Hirst Arts web site is they provide many great instructions and ideas for making the type of dungeon that I want to make: Hirst Arts Dungeon

 Being a little bit lazy I thought I would see what I could find on line to help me with my dungeon designs.

Fortunately for me it appears that role players are just as lazy and there were a few free online dungeon generators on line for me to choose from. Out of all the online dungeon generators I looked at, these three fit the bill best for my wants / needs:

The first one I looked at seemed to be the best. If allows you to construct different sized dungeons, add stairs, secret doors and you can remove any dead ends it may generate which prevents silly and pointless parts to a dungeon.
 The generator even numbers and fills the rooms with beasties for you, but I assume that is for a particular set of rules and I will just ignore the text part of the dungeon. The program allows you to save the dungeon as a PDF, and save an image for a player map with out the secret bits: Random dungeon generator 1

Player's Map for random dungeon

The next one is fairly good and is useful for generating a lot of rooms. Unlike the first one the layout is not always logical: dungeon generator 2

This one is very much like the first one, although I can't see a function that lets you print it out. Having said that, it does give you a link so you can create it again if need be: Dungeon generator 3
 One function I like is that you can determine the biggest room size, which I thought was a great function. It doesn't add stairs though.


Having created a dungeon, I will print it out and start planning the game tiles I need for my game.

For rules I might use the "Song of Blade and Heroes" or even keep it very simple and use the old "Fighting Fantasy" choose your own adventure system, or a little RPG game I have called "Dragon Warriors" that has since been reprinted by Mongoose Publishing and this year to be brought out by a company called "Serpent King Games". I have the original rules books, so I will use those.

 There is a great possibility that I will run games of this as a "Play By Blog" for followers of my blog very much like the zombie game being played on my zombie blog.